where orders emerge

Bryan Caplan on Creative Destruction

This video from LearnLiberty is the first of four featuring my brilliant younger colleague Bryan Caplan. Enjoy – and share!

There’s more insight and wisdom in this less-than-four-minute-long video featuring Bryan than there is in the nearly 700 pages of Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Far more. For example: Bryan focuses, as any respectable economist does, on real economic factors. Bryan draws our attention to what people actually consume and how people actually live. In stark contrast, Piketty focuses almost exclusively on nominal economic factors: monetary wealth and income. While there’s an obvious (and real!) connection between the two, they are not at all identical.

I’ll explain more in my review of Piketty’s book, forthcoming in Barron’s in about three weeks. I mention Piketty’s book here because, having just finished reading it very carefully, watching Bryan’s video is an especially refreshing – and needed – reminder of how insightful and instructive economics can be.